Security Systems News - John Wojdanhttp://www.securitysystemsnews.com/taxonomy/term/1800
enMass notification goes mainstreamhttp://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/mass-notification-goes-mainstream
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<div class="field-item even">Recent interest spurred by factors such as codes and extreme weather</div>
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<div class="field-item even" property="schema:datePublished dc:date"><span class="date-display-single" property="schema:datePublished dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-02-06T00:00:00-05:00">02/06/2012</span></div>
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<div class="field-item even" rel="schema:author dc:creator">Tess Nacelewicz</div>
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<div class="field-item even" property="schema:articleBody content:encoded"> <p>YARMOUTH, Maine—Military installations and college campuses are the two verticals best known for having mass notification systems. However, as that facet of the industry develops and grows, mass notification increasingly is in demand by a more diverse market, according to industry experts.</p>
<p>In upstate New York, for example, industries ranging from an ice cream-making plant to an aerospace manufacturer have added mass notification systems. In the Midwest, commercial buildings are showing greater interest since weather disasters such as the tornado that devastated Joplin, Mo., last May. And demand for mass notification is growing in K-12 schools and healthcare facilities all over the country, sources tell Security Systems News.</p>
<p>“It’s a new industry basically,” said John Wojdan, president of Buffalo, N.Y.-based Great Lakes Building Systems. “There are a lot of facilities yet to be tapped.”</p>
<p>In the past few years, Great Lakes, a Notifier by Honeywell distributor, has taken advantage of situations where it has been called in to upgrade a fire alarm system, using them as opportunities to convince customers to go with a more robust solution that includes a mass notification system.</p>
<p>One instance was at a plant owned by Moog, a worldwide aerospace manufacturer headquartered in New York. Great Lakes noticed the 300,000-square-foot plant had only a telephone system, which didn't always function, for emergency events, so it persuaded Moog to include mass notification along with its fire alarm system.</p>
<p>Great Lakes made similar successful upsells at Perry’s Ice Cream Co., an ice cream manufacturer in the Buffalo area, Wojdan said.</p>
<p>Why would an ice cream plant need a mass notification system?</p>
<p>“When you make ice cream, you need a lot of refrigeration apparatus and refrigeration apparatus is operated by ammonia,” Wojdan explained. “Ammonia is very toxic. If there’s an ammonia leak in that facility it can be catastrophic and deadly.”</p>
<p>Great Lakes also is adding a mass notification system to a food processing facility owned by upstate New York-based Steuben Foods, he said.</p>
<p>“They have some ammonia sensors there and also certain processes they want to monitor too,” he said. “So we’re not only going to use it for life safety, but also for a typical process in their production that could curtail or even ruin food if it shut down.”</p>
<p>The projects for both food businesses have been under way for about a year now, and are being done in phases because they’re taking place in working facilities, Wojdan said.</p>
<p>He said the first phase involved updating the fire alarm system and adding voice communication, “with all the appropriate amplification, amplifiers, digital voice communication and so on, and then the next step is to interface (with) the ammonia sensors that they had on site and develop a second tone, a second alert status with strobes.”</p>
<p>The third phase, which Wojdan said should be completed this spring, will be “to integrate that into a React system.” That computer software system allows for sending emergency alerts on multiple channels, including desktop computer displays for text messages and emails, he said.</p>
<p>Because mass notification is a relatively new part of the industry, Wojdan said, everyone has his or her “own verbiage to go along with it.”</p>
<p>For example, he said, “I like the phrase ‘critical response notification,’” which he said seems to fit best in industry applications, while mass notification is a more common term for educational solutions.</p>
<p>Scott Lord, executive officer of Kansas City, Kan.-based All Systems, which provides fire alarm, mass notification and security solutions for a wide range of verticals, agreed there are a variety of terms.</p>
<p>He said that generally in the industry, “mass notification can mean anything from a really good paging system to text messaging.”</p>
<p>But technically, he said, “mass notification is an in-building and exterior notification system that requires strobes and intelligible voice.”</p>
<p>Mass messaging, on the other hand, is the use of global emails, texts and cellphone messages—means of notification technically considered ancillary to mass notification in terms of life safety, he said.</p>
<p>There’s also the term emergency communication system, or ECS. “You kind of see both terms [mass notification and ECS] being used interchangeably,” Lord said.</p>
<p>Mass notification has a military origin, he said. In the 1996 terrorist bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, where American military personnel were housed, the fire alarm system proved inadequate to tell occupants of the building what to do in that type of event, he said.</p>
<p>“The only thing to communicate to everyone in the tower was the fire alarm system, and so the problem was that we had many people trying to evacuate the building and walking into the area where the bomb had exploded. … There were many lives lost simply because we couldn’t properly communicate with people in the building,” Lord said.</p>
<p>Afterward, he said, the Department of Defense concluded that “we need an alert system that can be intelligible that will allow us to be able to combat situations … that have to be handled differently than what we’ve seen from a fire perspective.”</p>
<p>The Unified Facilities Criteria that the DOD came up with in May 2002 defined the requirements for mass notification systems.</p>
<p>But Lord said a problem from a civilian perspective is that the military code required the mass notification system to take precedence over the fire alarm system—allowing for the fire alarm to be shut off to get intelligible messages to a building’s occupants.</p>
<p>That contradicted the National Fire Protection Association code at the time, which said the fire alarm had to be the highest notification in any building, he said.</p>
<p>However, that changed recently, Lord said. “NFPA 2010 is where we actually saw a complete change, where they added six chapters to the code, defining the emergency communication system and providing that the emergency communication system, the mass notification system, is the highest priority.”</p>
<p>And he predicts even more change will come with the 2014 International Building Code, which he believes “is going to define that new buildings, new structures, will have mass notification, so it’s going to become a standard, like fire alarm.”</p>
<p>The expectation that mass notification eventually will be required is driving some new demand from K-12 school districts and commercial buildings, at least in terms of future planning, Lord said.</p>
<p>“Not a lot of them really are pulling the trigger as far as putting a project together, but a lot of them are sitting there and saying, ‘What do we need to be looking at? If we remodel a wing on this building, what’s the best thing we ought to do, because we believe this is something we’re going to have to do soon,’” he said.</p>
<p>Lord said another factor sparking demand has turned out to be the weather disasters in the Midwest. “It’s sad that the interest has piqued ever since we had the issues in Joplin, Mo.,” he said. “Before, everyone had heard about [mass notification] but most said, ‘We’re waiting until the fire marshal comes and tells us we have to do it.’” But now, he said, they’re saying, “We don’t want to be one of those next buildings.”</p>
<p>Of course the traditional markets for mass notification—higher education and the military—continue to be robust.</p>
<p>Time and Alarm Systems, a Gamewell-FCI distributor based in Mira Loma, Calif., is actively pursuing the military and community college markets, said company president Keith Senn.</p>
<p>“Community colleges are big right now,” he said.</p>
<p>He said one community college project that the company is working on right now involves integrating the campus lighting systems with the emergency communication system.</p>
<p>“We’re actually integrating those systems so, if they have something occur at night, we then turn on the lights on the campus,” Senn said.</p>
<p>He said what lights are turned on depends on the situation, but it could be pathway lighting or lights in a particular building. “If there’s a gunman on campus or something like that and we can turn on some lighting in certain areas, the emergency responders could have a better opportunity to apprehend that suspect or deflect what’s going on,” he said.</p>
<p>In San Antonio, Duane Hannasch, president of Fire Alarm Control Systems, also a Gamewell-FCI distributor, said universities are a key vertical for his company when it comes to mass notification.</p>
<p>For example, he said a current project is at private Trinity University in San Antonio. “As they do their dormitory upgrades, and even the new ones [dormitories], they’re going with voice evacuation, even though it may not be required. They’re being proactive on that side to try and get ahead of the curve there,” he said. “And we’re talking to them about putting in the giant voice exterior solution and then combining the outside signal with the inside signal so that way they’ve got the entire campus covered, inside and out.”</p>
<p>Hannasch said his company urges campuses to use their mass notification systems for non-emergency events, so staff can become familiar with how their system works.</p>
<p>“We try to encourage them to use it for other things. Say they have a big soccer game or football game going on on campus, there’s no reason the guards can’t go on there and make the announcement, ‘The parking lot’s full, go park in another parking lot,’” he said.</p>
<p>That way, Hannasch said, staff members get used to operating the system, “so it’s not like when there’s an emergency someone looks at it and says, ‘What do I do?’”</p>
<p>He also said that since 2005, his company has installed 85 mass notification systems for the military.</p>
<p>He said that at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, for example, “we just finished what they call a BAT, a Big Area Tent. This tent is 18,000 square feet, it’s just nothing but a tent, but we put a mass notification system in there because this is where the troops can go and relax,” Hannasch said.</p>
<p>He said the tent, with canvas walls and roof and plastic room dividers, offers soldiers such amenities as pool tables, pinball, Wii, Nintendo and Xbox. It’s temporary for 14 months until a new activity center is built. But he said it must have a mass notification system because of military regulations that require places where defense personnel gather to be protected.</p>
<p>In 2012 and beyond, Hannasch believes the demand for mass notification systems in K-12 schools will grow because “the new building codes, the uniform fire code, they’re putting more emphasis on emergency communication systems in schools.”</p> </div>
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<span property="dc:title" content="Mass notification goes mainstream" class="rdf-meta element-hidden"></span>Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:19:13 +0000Tess Nacelewicz15205 at http://www.securitysystemsnews.comhttp://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/mass-notification-goes-mainstream#commentsGreat Lakes Building Systems has banner yearhttp://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/great-lakes-building-systems-has-banner-year
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<div class="field-item even"> N.Y. company says variety of factors led to 30 percent growth in 2011</div>
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<div class="field-item even" rel="schema:author dc:creator">Tess Nacelewicz</div>
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<div class="field-item even" property="schema:articleBody content:encoded"> <p>BUFFALO, N.Y.—Great Lakes Building Systems saw revenues increase by about 30 percent in 2011 over 2010, added five employees and is planning to open a third office this year, company president John Wojdan told <em>Security Systems News</em>.</p>
<p>“We had a record-breaking year in 2011,” said Wojdan, co-owner of the full-service fire and security company, which is based here and embarking on its 11th year. “There are several reasons why. I like to say that all cylinders are finally clicking here after 10 years of being in business.”</p>
<p>One reason, Wojdan said, is that Great Lakes opened a new office in Rochester, N.Y., about two years ago and that office had “a very good year.”</p>
<p>Also, the company, which had done piecemeal work with portable fire extinguishers, kitchen hood systems and clean suppression agents, last January “decided to jump in [to that side of the industry] with two feet,” he said.</p>
<p>“We rented out some more warehouse space down the road and hired a guy experienced in that industry and he’s off and running with it now,” Wojdan said. “We’re doing a lot of the extinguishing work too, as well as our fire alarm and security.”</p>
<p>In addition, he said, “we do a lot of cross-selling” of fire alarms and fire suppression and security products.</p>
<p>For example, he said, if a hotel wants a quote on a fire alarm system, the company will offer to package that with other services it offers, ranging from cameras and access control to a kitchen suppression system, saving customers money and enabling them to call one company for service instead of several.</p>
<p>Not only has the company sold more, but “our service department had a great year too because they’re taking in all this recurring revenue that’s generated from the team-selling approach,” Wojdan said.</p>
<p>Mass notification was another factor in Great Lakes’ banner year, he said. For some years now, the company has been working to convince businesses for which it does fire alarm work to upgrade to include mass notification systems. That has resulted in Great Lakes landing large contracts to provide mass notification for industries that range from an aerospace manufacturer to food manufacturers, “We’ve done a great job by expanding our core fire alarm systems to provide other services for them,” Wojdan said.</p>
<p>Great Lakes, a Notifier by Honeywell distributor, plans to open a third office in Syracuse, N.Y., sometime in 2012, he said. The company has been doing a lot of work in that city and “we just received authorization from Notifier to expand our sales territory to include central New York state.”</p> </div>
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<span property="dc:title" content="Great Lakes Building Systems has banner year" class="rdf-meta element-hidden"></span>Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:51:39 +0000Tess Nacelewicz15172 at http://www.securitysystemsnews.comhttp://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/great-lakes-building-systems-has-banner-year#commentsECS = ‘A brand new industry’http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/ecs-%E2%80%98-brand-new-industry%E2%80%99
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<div class="field-item even">Demand has grown for emergency communication systems since 9/11, panel of experts says</div>
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<div class="field-item even" property="schema:datePublished dc:date"><span class="date-display-single" property="schema:datePublished dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-09-08T13:31:36-04:00">09/08/2011</span></div>
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<div class="field-item even" rel="schema:author dc:creator">Tess Nacelewicz</div>
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<div class="field-item even" property="schema:articleBody content:encoded"><p>NORTHFORD, Conn.—Before Sept. 11, 2001, few people saw the need for a comprehensive emergency communications system, according to Peter Ebersold, marketing director for Notifier by Honeywell.</p>
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<p>However, he said, that was before first responders at the World Trade Center were not able to communicate well with each other because of such factors as the Twin Towers’ structure and the early damage they sustained, and because the buildings’ occupants did not receive the emergency information they needed.</p>
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<p>Now, Ebersold predicted, “over the next five to 10 years, we’re going to see almost every facility install an emergency communications system as more owners and occupants realize that any facility can face a threat, whether it’s a weather event or a medical emergency, a chemical spill or an intruder, and multiple message paths and survivability of the system will be the essential components of any ECS system involved.”</p>
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<p>Ebersold made his comments Sept. 1 as part of a five-member panel of experts at an Emergency Communications Media Forum webinar put on by Notifier, which is based here.</p>
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<p>The webinar took place less than two weeks before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and addressed such questions as how mass notification has changed since that time. Other topics included intelligibility and the rising demand for ECS in new markets.</p>
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<p>Panelist John Wojdan, president of Great Lakes Building Systems in Buffalo, N.Y., said it’s not just the military and colleges campuses that want ECS today.</p>
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<p>“We’ve been very successful up here in western New York, promoting emergency communication systems for industrial complexes and now food processing facilities.”</p>
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<p>He cited a change in the 2010 version of NFPA 72 “that allowed us [fire installers] to go in and use our fire equipment for mass notification purposes.”</p>
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<p>He gave examples of instances where his company was called in to upgrade a fire system and they convinced those in charge that an ECS was needed.</p>
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<p>“Before you know it, their fire system had now become a combination fire/emergency communication system. It’s very exciting now that we have a brand new avenue here, a brand new industry basically, to pursue along with our fire products,” Wojdan said.</p>
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<p>Bob Kaczmarek, VP sales &amp; marketing for FireTron Inc. of Stafford, Texas, said integrating the mass notification with fire systems is a whole new way of thinking for the industry.</p>
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<p>He said in his 30 years of experience, “it’s always been taboo to use the fire alarm voice evacuation system” for such things as tornado warnings.</p>
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<p>“Now,” he said, “we’re going back the other way in our industry and we’re using the voice evacuation system of the fire alarm systems to do these different things, and it really cuts the cost of systems down for the facility.”</p>
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<p>Panelist Jack Poole, principal of Poole Fire Protection in Olathe, Kan., who has been involved in ECS projects nationwide and as far away as Japan, answered a question about how to insure that messages are intelligible.</p>
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<p>He advised using a modeling program to help calculate the acoustical conditions of a particular space and determine how to configure speakers.</p>
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<p>He also noted there is “a misconception” that “you need intelligible signals in every space of the building.”</p>
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<p>For example, he said, in a huge warehouse “it may be a challenge to achieve intelligibility” because of its size and acoustic conditions.</p>
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<p>One solution, he said, is to “provide audibility [in the warehouse] and direct the people to a location where they can understand the message as opposed to being out in the middle of the warehouse.”</p>
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<p>Another panelist, Bob Farm, project manager for United Fire Protection in Kenilworth, N.J., talked about his company’s recent installation of an ECS in Penn Station, New York City’s busy commuter hub.</p>
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<p>He said the challenges included working around train schedules in tunnels while installing equipment, and adding redundant signaling paths and separating circuits to “enhance the survivability” of the system in the event of a disaster.</p>
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<p>“So even if you have wire or conduit damage you have the survivability,” he said.</p>
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<span property="dc:title" content="ECS = ‘A brand new industry’" class="rdf-meta element-hidden"></span>Thu, 08 Sep 2011 17:31:36 +0000legacy_editor14924 at http://www.securitysystemsnews.comhttp://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/ecs-%E2%80%98-brand-new-industry%E2%80%99#commentsHeeding trend pays dividends for Great Lakeshttp://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/heeding-trend-pays-dividends-great-lakes
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<div class="field-item even">Company says lesson is: Be prepared to integrate fire and mass notification</div>
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<div class="field-item even" rel="schema:author dc:creator">Tess Nacelewicz</div>
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<div class="field-item even" property="schema:articleBody content:encoded"><p>BUFFALO, N.Y.—Being ahead of the mass notification curve has paid off for Great Lakes Building Systems, helping it win contracts worth about $850,000, according to company president John Wojdan.</p>
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He said that the 10-year-old company, which is based here and is a Notifier Engineered Systems Co. affiliate and a certified Honeywell Commercial Security Systems dealer, realized over the past few years that “the fire guys … would be the leaders in mass notification because our systems are extremely robust and all our systems are supervised to comply with the national fire codes.”</p>
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So the company of about 25 employees geared up for that trend. Then they got a job about a year ago with Moog, a worldwide aerospace designer and manufacturer headquartered in nearby East Aurora, N.Y., to upgrade the fire alarm system in a 300,000-square-foot plant.</p>
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Great Lakes noticed that the huge plant had only a telephone system, which didn’t always work, to alert people of a fire or other emergency, Wojdan said. So he said his company suggested tying a mass notification system in with the fire alarm system they were installing.</p>
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Great Lakes ended up installing a Notifier by Honeywell system in plant 11 with REACT Systems mass notification software, he said.</p>
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Moog was so pleased with the </p>
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$300,000 job that it has led to more, Wojdan said. This year, Great Lakes is expecting to get more than a half a million dollars to complete similar jobs in two more Moog plants, he said.</p>
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“I guess the lesson to be learned in our business is that the true integration of systems is now happening, and those guys that are poised and ready to do that kind of work are going to not just survive but thrive in our industry,” Wojdan said.</p>
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He said the system installed at plant 11 is “true integration with fire and mass notification.” He described how it works: “What this software product does is it takes a signal from our fire systems or their medical emergency buttons and broadcasts it out to cell phones. So in the event of an emergency, they would get not only their speaker strobes blaring at the plant, but every guy that’s on the fire brigade would get a cell phone text message, and he would get his cell phone ringing and a voice stating, ‘Fire alarm in plant 11.’ And if he is sitting at his PC … he’ll get a red screen pop up on his PC stating, ‘Fire alarm in plant 11.’”</p>
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Wojdan is co-owner of Great Lakes with his business partner, William Blanchard.</p>
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As SSN reported in April, <a href="http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/glbs-your-service" target="_blank">the two are former Simplex employees who decided in 2001 to start their own company</a> after Tyco acquired Simplex, Wojdan said.</p>
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He said Great Lakes, which does fire and security systems as well as fire suppression, stands out because it guarantees a response time of four hours to its customers. He said the company now has about 900 customers in the commercial, industrial, educational and health care verticals, and opened a satellite office in Rochester last year.</p>
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In its Buffalo headquarters, Great Lakes also has a demonstration training center, where the company holds lunch and learn sessions for customers on the latest products. That’s how the company sold Moog on the products installed at the plant, Wojdan said.</p>
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“We like to say we’ve got a perfect record as far as closing a job when we bring people in here (to the demonstration facility),” he said.</p>
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<span property="dc:title" content="Heeding trend pays dividends for Great Lakes" class="rdf-meta element-hidden"></span>Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:08:20 +0000legacy_editor14364 at http://www.securitysystemsnews.comhttp://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/heeding-trend-pays-dividends-great-lakes#comments